“The small-town kid who knows there’s something more out there, but gets fucked up trying to find it. “The American Girl is just one example of this character that I write about a lot,” Tom Petty said. “I wanted that song to be a kind of redemptive song,” Petty said. It became one of his most inspirational tunes. The song, which also contains allusions to the just-ended Gulf War (“The sea may burn”), was pulled together in an evening with Lynne, who came up with chords to go under Petty’s melody.
“He said there’s not much to learning to fly the difficult thing is coming down, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s true,’” Petty recalled. It’s really simple music, simple lyrics.” Petty claims to have gotten the words almost verbatim from watching a television interview with a pilot. That was fun.” But he adds that what made the song work was the simplicity of Petty’s writing: “That’s the miracle of the song. My favorite part was the little drum break at the end – dica-dica-dic boom-boom. “Tons of acoustic guitars on it, layered really thick, strumming away. “‘Learning to Fly’ was a Jeff Lynne production,” says Mike Campbell. “It’s that band 30 years later,” Petty said. “I said, ‘Listen, I think we have something here, but we’re going to have to get excited about it.’” Eventually, he brought them around, and it became one of their best late-period anthems, delivered with the fire of late-Seventies Heartbreakers and the feel and nuance of men who’ve been playing together for decades. “Silence,” he said, recalling their initial response. Amazingly, when Petty first played the song for his bandmates, they weren’t impressed. “We hadn’t made a straight hard-rockin’ record, from beginning to end, in a long time.” The album recalled the tough, hungry intensity of the Heartbreakers’ debut and You’re Gonna Get It!, especially its gut-punch opening track, “American Dream Plan B.” The growling guitar riff is one of their hardest ever, and the lyric mixes resigned wit and up-against-the-wall defiance: “I’m half lit/I can’t dance for shit/But I see what I want/I go after it,” Petty sings. “I knew I wanted to do a rock & roll record,” Petty told Rolling Stone of 2014’s Hypnotic Eye.
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